CANCELLED: Malika Booker, Vahni Capildeo & Jason Allen-Paisant

 Due to unforeseen circumstances this Manchester Literature Festival event is cancelled

Join us for an afternoon with three fabulous, inventive poets who raise questions about our relationships with language, landscape and identity. Vahni Capildeo’s Like a Tree, Walking explores ecopoetics and silence, with poems originating from nocturnes and lullabies in hilly Port of Spain to ‘stillness exercises’ recording micro-environments around English trees. Jason Allen-Paisant’s Thinking with Trees considers what it means to be Black in natural spaces usually considered the domain of white people. Linking Black history to present day events, he walks through the pandemic considering how the future could be. The founder of Malika’s Poetry Kitchen, Malika Booker is a pioneer of the poetry scene and writes out of a passion for Caribbean culture, community and bearing witness. She will be reading new and recent poems.

Vahni Capildeo is a Trinidadian poet. Their collections include Venus as a Bear, which was the Poetry Book Society Summer Choice 2018 and was shortlisted for the 2018 Forward Prize, and Measures of Expatriation, awarded the Forward Best Collection Prize 2016. Jason Allen-Paisant is from a village called Coffee Grove in Manchester, Jamaica. At present, he’s a lecturer in Caribbean Poetry & Decolonial Thought in the School of English at the University of Leeds. Malika Booker is a British poet and theatre-maker of Guyanese and Grenadian parentage. Her poetry collection Pepper Seed was shortlisted for the OCM Botas prize and her poem The Little Miracles won the 2020 Forward Prize for Best Single Poem.

Hosted by John McAuliffe and presented in partnership with Centre for New Writing and Creative Manchester

Please note: We have reduced the capacity at this venue to increase space between seats so everyone can enjoy the event safely. If you’d like to sit with friends, please book all seats together in the same transaction. Although masks are no longer mandatory under Government guidance, we strongly encourage everyone to wear one when in close proximity to others, particularly when entering and leaving the event. We also encourage everyone to use the sanitation stations and sign in using track and trace when they arrive.